Beezone Edit
Three Talks of Adi Da Samraj talking to his devotees combined and edited.
February – December 1993
Be Surrendered to the Degree of Beatitude
Devotee: I love You my Lord.
Sri Gurudev: (Sri Gurudev hugs and kisses devotee). That is the most directly devotional act you have ever done in My Company. Not just the hug and the kiss, but the feeling and the sounds that accompanied it. I Love you, Never forget or act otherwise.
To the degree you will not allow it you are not simplified, you are not full of Grace, beatitude does not characterize your face. Your are not murdered, not wounded absolutely. Struggling to survive. You have that hard face, that surviving look, and you are moving about to accomplish it. There are some moments in life, obviously there is the moment in death, in which you get this Grace with the possible knowledge, though some may escape it or forget about it. But it is the Secret, to be so vulnerable that you are not performing your own act anymore. It is the secret of life to be so given up, in life, not merely fearing death because that is required of you then. But in life, to be so given up, so surrendered. This is the secret of Beatitude, the secret of Enlightenment.
Devotee: Beloved Sri Gurudev, You put a book on The Basket of Tolerance called The Dark Night of the Soul by John of the Cross, and he talks about it not just a catharsis, not necessarily as a single event, but as surrender.
Sri Gurudev: Surrender not done, surrender accomplished by God. You have no option, all your options over, so imposed upon that you are dead! That is prapati, that is God-Realization, that is true surrender, that is self forgetting. It is not merely crisis moments that may provoke it or make it necessary – death and other difficult moments you see. You are in that very moment now but you have developed through this self-contraction means to avoid it, to desensitize yourself to the imposition, the force of this very moment. The force of My Company, the force altogether of existence in this moment.
You all know who is doing the really important work in life among ordinary human beings. It is the people who are dying. They are on the edge of having to deal with everything which has to be dealt with and they have no options.
Our good friend Barry passed on from here a couple of weeks ago after a long period of his suffering. You know very well that that is where he really did his work. You know very well that in that circumstance you will do that work. Well sometimes death comes suddenly. You never know whether you can do it as a process very much. But in your feeling before it occurs, comes up for you, you know that there is at least one time when you have to deal with everything, when you know you will come to the point where you have no options, no strategies that apply. The whole mass of it will be so overwhelming, so complex the maya cannot be figured out, and surrender will be accomplished, not merely dying by you. Accomplished utterly.
But it is not enough to do it on your death bed, you see. That can be purifying. It is a necessity you know will be imposed upon you, As I have said to you all, you are dying while alive. Your life is about dying. You are enduring the psychology of beings and have heard they are going to die and are spending your life going through the mass of rounds of anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance — every complex that could be described out it, you see. You are living a death process while alive, but you are not really accomplishing it, you are not really dealing with it altogether. You are dealing with it piece meal and you are all the time coming up with strategies to avoid your sensitivity to it, to avoid the imposition of 1t, and that is your whole life, that is the search. Because the surrender is not accomplished the self-contraction remains in tact. It is all reactivity, desire, seeking, objects, others, drama! You allow your entire life to become just that when you could, not just on your death bed but now, in every moment of life, be so submitted as one in a terminal state and go beyond all those illusions, all those strategies you see.
Be surrendered to the degree of Beatitude, beyond your own effort, now! To take on the religious life in My company, to do sadhana in My Company is about that. There are not so many accomplishing it most profoundly yet, but you are guided by it, you are focused in it. You are given means to enhance that potential more and more profoundly. But that is what it is about, you see, That is what Enlightenment is! Not some glorious, smiling, healthy self image you see. But that absolute murdered ego surrender. The great Divine Imposition accepted without qualification. That is what your life in. My company is about, that is what the Way of the Heart is about, that is what your devotion to Me is about, And all the time I am enhancing your capability, working to enhance your capability for just this event.
Devotee: I feel in my own case I am constantly trying to console myself and avoid exactly what You are talking about,
Sri Gurudev: You know you are being killed.
Devotee: I do not know that,
Sri Gurudev: You do know that you are being killed, everything is killing you. You are going to die, there are no two ways about it. Andrea: I do not feel it.
Sri Gurudev: But you know it do you not?
Devotee: Not really.
Sri Gurudev: You do not know that this is true?
Devotee: Intellectually I know it.
Sri Gurudev: Well that is enough. You know it, but you do not want to feel it, you do not want to live as if it is so, you are trying to avoid it, you are trying to survive in the face of this great imposition that you know is so. That is it, that is Narcissus, that is a reason for it. That is the cause of the dreadful egoic life. And of course you are trying to immunize yourself in every possible fashion — physically, emotionally, mentally, socially, functionally, practically, relationally, in every possible fashion you are trying to immunize yourself against this imposition that you know, absolutely, the best you can do is avoid it maybe for a little while. You are avoiding the very fundamental nature of existence by trying to survive. It is paradoxical but it is true.
All the dead wake up, all the living can. The thing you think is an evil is a great source of Beatitude. Not the common every day evil, not negativity merely in the normal context, but the great one, the great matter, the great event. The snuffing out of all your survival efforts, all your self-possession, all your separateness, the utter dissolution of it beyond any capability on your part toward it. This is what you are avoiding. This is Narcissus, this is the self-contraction.
Devotee: Sri Gurudev, You say it is the source of Beatitude because we have no option but surrender?
Sri Gurudev: It is not even an option, is what I am saying. It is simply the Grace of Reality.
Devotee: You talk about conditional existence is a great force, As You were speaking I was feeling how I am pressed in from all sides by this place,
Sri Gurudev: I remember reading some book many years ago, somebody was asked “What is God?” Pressure. You feel pressured, imposed upon, intruded upon, it threatens your survival separately, your separateness. It threatens it. You are all the time threatened by it, you are all the time under stress. There is that imposition and your refusal to allow it. Your refusal to allow it is the self-contraction. That is why you must find it out, so that you will come to the point genius of allowance. It is the most fundamental capability you have, this allowance. But you rehearse your entire life as a dramatization of the avoidance of it. So that is why it is said that all life is suffering. That is why it becomes suffering, you see. In any moment, to the quick, it can be Beatitude, but it is suffering because of this contraction.
SRI DA AVABHASA: (You all want things to work) out to be perfect. Have utopia, or maybe you could have what has been called the “Kingdom of God” Sort of fall on your head. You think religion should not require this great exercise from you, but you inn your “self-possessed”, suffering state must magically be served and relieved and kissed, you see. And that’s not how it works.
I mentioned to you several weeks ago about how the Tibetan tradition, a few fundamental communications made, even to the common people, you see. And the most fundamental communication made is that everything changes and everyone dies. There’s no permanence, and everyone’s mortal, everything you see arising in the natural domain is changing, passing, nothing’s permanent, everything passes, everyone dies, that means you. That’s among the principal, most fundamental communications made in that tradition, and also made in many other traditions.
They then communicate to them, there is a dharma, a way, beyond suffering. But that doesn’t make any sense. That’s not the principal communication, you see? It’s the principal in the sense of being the greater communication, but the communication you got to get straight with first is that conditional existence is suffering, passing, changing, impermanent, mortal. And what are the Tibetans called to do then? To accept that firmly, fundamentally, in their daily moment to moment consciousness, and never relinquish it.
You all, in your disposition, you see, not governed by such imperatives, want to maintain a state of existence bereft of that understanding. And to do so, you out yourself off, not only from conditional nature, but from the Divine. So you’re wandering in some strange soup of changes, but trying to maintain a self-pleasurized state, immune. You’re like zombies. You’re asleep. You’re not experiencing reality, conditional or unconditional. You’re in a dream, an illusion, “Narcissus”, possessed by a misinterpretation of reality, a state desensitized to reality. You’re possessed by an illusion — not merely an illusion in the form of a thought–it occurs in that farm too, you see–but an illusion of experience, an illusion of presumption all over the body-mind. You’ve desensitized yourself to reality. You are actively doing s0 by divorcing yourself from intelligence and wandering in a subjective state of relative pleasure as much as you can manage it, you see. That’s your situation at the pond, that ordinary state of self-pleasure which you are always serving, always trying to maintain.
Devotee: [Inaudible] to feel the constant stress of just what this place really is about.
SRI DA AVABHASA: But then it’s just stress,
Devotee: Yeah, It’s not intelligent[ence!]
SRI DA AVABHASA: Not a conclusion, not intelligence.
Devotee: That’s right.
SRI DA AVABHASA: Not knowing conditional existence for what it is, but knowing the Divine is also, or the Ultimate Conditional is also, and making a life on that basis, exercising yourself intelligently toward Divine Realization, So all you get is the stress of conditional reality, but not any real understanding of it such that you can change your way of life,
Devotee: Da!
SRI DA AVABHASA: You are absolutely dependent on the One who is this Source of this horror you have made. You have every right to be anxious and fearful, being separate from God. You are making your own destiny instead of submitting to the One Who Is, and being purified and having a better, or even ultimate, destiny made by Grace. If you simply understood your position and functioned on that basis, you see, everything would be clarified.
Devotee: I feel very grateful for tonight’s consideration that You have Given us, because I can bring the will to that. I couldn’t do it bringing the will to trying to sort through my own body-mind,
SRI DA AVABHASA: Mmm hmm, That is exactly so, and that is what I have been telling you for twenty-two years. Nearly twenty-two. Just that. Narcissus is unillumined, uninformed, self-possessed, and can’t work it out. You must respond to Me, turn up from the pond, exercise yourself in this devotion to Me, and that is the Way.
That is the traditional way also, that is the secret of the entire Great Tradition of mankind. It has always been so. It is the essential content of all the traditions, although they get diverted from it and so forth, get complicated and tend to move toward the lower-based or the ego-matter, so there is lots of that too. But this is the fundamental truth, the Great Truth, the Great Secret. And you can see it in the traditions everywhere, variously displayed. And it is a useful exercise to examine the traditions and see that it is so. It is part of your study. But it is not itself the way, to just be studying the traditions and making equations or seeing likenesses and talking it and quoting from the Great Tradition in your lectures and remarks and writings, you see. Then you make it non-useful to the degree that that is the only exercise you are up to, you see, it is lust another useful sign or intrusion, see it proven there too, you see. It is a supportive exercise. If you make it into a thing in and of itself, and try to somehow find the way just in the traditions and the literature and the history.
The way itself, as a whole and totally, and in its ultimate demonstration is in the Great Traditions. You can find there, by considering My Word, you will find there, if you examine it, this key is there, this essential Truth is there. It is the foundation of the entire tradition of mankind, although most forget it or don’t take it all that seriously, or don’t know how, really, to become involved in it.
That being the case, then also in the traditional setting, people lust use books, metaphors, myths, and so forth, to some how dummy up this process. It doesn’t work that way. There must be the direct revelation, not the myth of the Realizer, but the Realizer in Person. And the Way given by the Word emanating from that One who is Samadhi itself.
So that way is suggested metaphorically, and piecemeal, and here and there, to one degree or another, manifested in the Great Tradition, is here manifested whole in My own Person, and given its full, right, non-mythological, true, real basis,
Devotee: Yes, Da.
SRI DA AVABHASA: It should be a simple matter for all, then, for all beings, all mankind, for all beings altogether, a simple matter to redress the wrongs of this now dark age. It requires this conversion one by one.
Devotee: Well, I have also noticed in studying the Great Tradition that there is a disposition of surrender, but often it is not, so much of the time it is not to the fullness of God, it is not what You have Given us, or shown us.
SRI DA AVABHASA: It is turned to various purposes, generally egoic. The essential Yoga, Ishta-Guru-Bhakti Yoga is also there. But then arguments laid on top of it, and everything to bow to or make compromises about relative to ordinary ego-based people in order to accommodate them in the general fold of religion. And, after awhile, no Realizers present, what is left! Just a call to believe in Santa Claus, you see, and behave in a positive social manner.